The rape of the Babylonian women

On 21 or 22
October 331, Alexander
entered Babylon,
the old capital of the ancient Near East. He had promised that the houses
of the city would be left intact, but this did not mean that the women
of Babylon were safe, especially since the Greeks believed that the people
of Babylon were obsessed with sex.

For example, a century before, the Greek researcher
Herodotus
of Halicarnassus had written that in Babylon, the women had to serve
Muliššu, the goddess of love, as prostitutes.

There is one custom amongst these people which is wholly shameful:
every woman who is native of the country must once in her life go and sit
in the temple of Aphrodite[1] and there give herself to
a strange man. [...] Once a woman has taken her seat she is not allowed
to go home until a man has thrown her a silver coin into her lap and taken her outside to lie with her. As he throws the coin,
the man has to say, 'In the name of the goddess Mylitta' - that being the
Assyrian
name for Aphrodite. [...] When she has lain with him, her duty to the goddess
is discharged and she may go home.

There is not a single piece of Babylonian
evidence to confirm this statement. That modern scholars have accepted
Herodotus' words as a description of cultic prostitution (a practice that
had existed 2,000 years before Alexander) and have believed that it contained
a kernel of truth, tells quite a lot about the fantasies of modern classicists
and historians. In fact, it is likely that Herodotus is simply wrong, never
visited Babylon at all, and is only to be trusted as a reliable source
for common Greek prejudices about the oriental world.

Common Greek prejudices: Alexander's men believed
that this custom existed and behaved accordingly. The Roman author Quintus
Curtius Rufus describes how the Babylonian women were treated; and
although he describes their behavior as voluntary, we need not doubt that
in fact it was not. Greek and Roman authors nearly always blamed women
for being raped.

Section 5.1.36-38 of Curtius Rufus' History
of Alexander the Great of Macedonia was translated by John Yardley.

Babylon

Alexander's stop in Babylon was longer
than anywhere else, and here he undermined military discipline more than
in any other place. The moral corruption there is unparalleled; its ability
to stimulate and arouse unbridled passions is incomparable. Parents and
husbands permit their children and wives to have sex with strangers, as
long as this infamy is paid for. All over the Persian empire kings and
their courtiers are fond of parties, and the Babylonians are especially
addicted to wine and the excesses that go along with drunkenness. Women
attend dinner parties. At first they are decently dressed, then they remove
their top-clothing and by degrees disgrace their respectability until (I
beg my reader's pardon for saying it) they finally throw off their most
intimate garments. This disgusting conduct is characteristic not only of
courtesans but also of married women and young girls, who regard such vile
prostitution as 'being sociable'.

Note 1:
Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of love; her name could be used to
describe similar goddesses abroad, such as Ištar or Muliššu.